Orfeo Tagiuri: The Great Bambino

Incubator is pleased to present The Great Bambino, an exhibition of new wood carvings by Orfeo Tagiuri.

Through his tender wood carvings, Orfeo Tagiuri engages with the human impulse to make one's mark. Like lovers carving their initials into trees or generations of students digging doodles into a school desk, the Massachusetts-born artist works into stained birch plywood from his studio in West London, engraving delicate scenes that tell stories of love, mortality and connection.

Tagiuri’s Incubator display is the culmination of a pivotal few months, both personally and in his practice. Historically, the artist has created dreamy cartoonish figures plucked from his imagination, working in a flurried haze of a particular feeling. A residency at the verdant Worlingham Hall in Suffolk this spring saw the artist work from life for the first time in years, crafting studies of flowers and leaves in a new gorgeous realism. Opening up an untread realm of possibility, the months that would follow saw the artist allow subjects to call upon him to be rendered, trusting that a conversation between them would take hold.

Gently, a few themes began to arise – family, identity, the passage of time, and what lingers of us in this world after we are gone. The exhibition found its starting point in a spirit of play after the artist stumbled upon Bruno Munari’s 1958 Supplement to an Italian Dictionary, which details the meaning behind dozens of Italian hand gestures. Merging his Italian-American identity and the physical language shared between his friends, Tagiuri lays down his own gestural lexicon that includes asking for a lighter, a handgun, and deceptive fingers crossed behind the back. These studies of his own body took on new meaning following the death of his uncle John Tagiuri in the summer, a fellow artist who also frequently worked with wood, coming to represent the hands of a craftsman.

Other subjects gathered in this show also began to take on an elegiac overtones. Defying the passage of time, curling fallen leaves are suspended mid-air and crisp anemone blooms are frozen in wood. Meanwhile, the foot of a young ballet dancer rendered from a photograph found in a second hand shop reminds us that engaging with art – be it through making, dance or music – is a way of accessing the eternal. Like Charon, the ferryman who rowed the souls of the dead down the River Styx, a depiction of a swan gliding upriver against a stream leading to a great unknown sea becomes another poetic symbol of transcendence.

The final work Tagiuri created for the exhibition, which lends the show its title, is a devotional study of the hands of baseball god Babe Ruth, affectionately known as The Bambino. Like any great artist or musician who continues to affect us from beyond, the wood carving pays tribute to Ruth’s lasting mythology in Boston, where much of Tagiuri’s family live. Legend has it Ruth put a curse on the city’s team after being sold to the Yankees in 1920, and the artist remembers the elation in the streets when it was broken nearly a century later, in 2004. A meeting point between hand studies, ideas of legacy, reverence and what remains, it was the only piece created after the loss of Tagiuri’s uncle.

This exhibition marks a new way of seeing for the artist. Presenting ten works imbued with deep personal resonance, Tagiuri has begun to approach his practice as a leap of faith – trusting that even if the narratives held within each piece aren’t instantly apparent, that something stirring is instinctively felt. It's the difference, he says, between a random shopping list and one written by your mum that you've kept since you were 10.

Written by Orla Brennan